A Pale View of Hills has caught the loss and uncertainty of modern Japan…. (p. 266)
[It] is a beautiful and dense novel, gliding from level to level of consciousness as it slips between the narrator Etsuko Sheringham's widowed life in the English countryside and her days as a young pregnant wife in the suburbs of Nagasaki, where she managed to find one important friend. The atomic bomb had fallen not long before, but, as the author drily observes, "Memory, I realise, can be an unreliable thing"; in A Pale View of Hills the memory of the bomb and what it did to a city is at one with the memory of Mrs Sheringham's daughter, Keiko, a suicide in a Manchester rooming house. Just as centrally to the novel, the memory of a little girl, beside a muddy Nagasaki river, watching the drowning of her pet kittens, is at one with that same girl some years before, watching a mother in the dying embers of Tokyo, drowning her baby in another river.
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